“We are dealing with the worst case scenario,” he said.
Lumumba issued a state of emergency Monday night, citing “complications” at the O.B. Curtis Water Plant, and urged residents to report leaks. He put the city under a boil water notice late Sunday morning, and the notice remained in place Tuesday afternoon. The city government was distributing water to residents.
“System pressures remain low,” Lumumba said, but “slightly better than yesterday.”
The recent winter water problem highlights Jackson’s systemic struggle with providing consistently safe water for customers.
Federal officials say city leaders have mismanaged the water system in Jackson for a long time, leading to a collapse in early 2021 when a winter storm took the system offline for a month.
Then this summer, severe flooding caused much of the city of 150,000 residents to lose water for days, and a boil-water notice stayed in effect for more than a month.
Some residents took their own legal action in September by asking a federal judge for class-action status so they could sue the city together, The Washington Post reported at the time. “This public health crisis, decades in the making, was wholly foreseeable by Defendants’ actions,” the filing said, “and has left Jackson residents in an untenable position — without access to clean, safe water in 2022 in a major United States city.”
The U.S. Department of Justice in November appointed a third-party manager of the city’s water system, “taking action in federal court to address long-standing failures in the city of Jackson’s public drinking water system,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time.
Now, with another winter storm interrupting life, residents are commenting on official city social media posts with exasperation.
“I believe this might be the last straw for a lot of restaurants. They cant continue to boil water. The poor folks in south jackson are taking the brunt of this,” one person wrote.
Another wrote: “Will there be reimbursement for hotel stay for families like mine? What about for water year round just to brush our teeth? Mr mayor, Mr Governor Mr President are you there? The capital city is suffering!”
Lumumba, the mayor, said Tuesday that FEMA was reviewing the situation.
Allie Jasper, a Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesperson, said MEMA had “no role” in mitigating this week’s water crisis. The city had not requested the agency’s assistance as of Tuesday afternoon.
Lumumba did not directly blame anyone for his constituents living without consistent water.
“We do not control Mother Nature,” he said. “We are dealing with an old and crumbling system.”
Jackson is “tired of this being the norm,” Lumumba said of the water problems he “inherited.”
“We’re tired of apologies.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.